i m alex witt here at msnbc headquarters in new york. it s 33 past the hour. here s what we re monitoring for you. lots of breaking reaction this hour to the president s nfl feud, the very latest from the owner of the oakland raiders, who says, quote, i can no longer ask your team to not say something while they re in a raider uniform. the only thing i can ask them to do is do it with class. not only do we have to tell people there is something wrong, we have to come up with answers. that s the challenge in front of us as americans and human beings. let s bring in mike who has made his way from capitol hill to maryland s fedex field where the raiders will be playing the washington redskins. let s talk about what you re seeing there, the sense of things, what you have heard. there have got to be some folks that may be tailgating already. what can you tell us? well, right. this game starts at 8:30. it is a primetime game on nbc. we haven t seen a lot of foot traffic here yet, alex, but
morning. a number of those nfl ravens and jaguars players you re seeing there taking a knee in defiance of the president s remarks on their form of protest. standing beside them, players and staff linking arms as a show of solidarity. here s what former ravens player adalious thomas told me, calling on the republican party to speak up. the fact that he s continued to divide us as a country and he s shown his true colors, but the republican party has defended him from christie, who said it was new york everyday talk earlier, i think paul ryan said he s new at this. that was one of the excuses. so it will be interesting to hear their excuse now, saying my freedom of speech is only on my own time, not when i m clocked in. if that s the case, you re the president for the next four years. how about you use that same rhetoric for yourself? we should also say perhaps most notably, overseas in london, the owner of the jacksonville jaguars, he came out, rather, and linked arms in
and the church pews are usually packed. this community of antioch, do you know population? off hand, i don t know that right now. you know, again, it s kind of a nearby area, so it s definitely not a rural area of the town. okay. all right, well joe ebert with the nashville, tennesseens, let us know if you get any more information. we ll keep doing our homework here as well. thank you for speaking with us. and for all of you, after a short break, we ll get the latest on the nfl protests. stay with us.
said, the nfl, the nba, major league baseball, they are not traditional businesses. they run on young supple bodies. and when those young supple bodies decide to disappear, that s why you see jerry jones and all these guys sign this thing with goodell condemning trump because he s talking about firing everybody. they know they can t do that. they know that if they fire all these guys, there s no product. that s not like whatever business you run, but their business runs on human beings. that s it. they don t come to the stadium to see jerry jones. maybe your employees come to see you, but in this business, the fans, all those 67,000, 70,000, they come to see players play. when those players say you know what? we re going to kneel, we re not going to show up, the owner says you know what, if we fire these guys, we ve got no product. so what do you think about that? well, i say like i said all along. we all have the right to work
but, you know, this is unfortunate because it s the national ant anthem and they neo respect the military. look, at every professional sports game, you do see a tribute paid to service members. this is not about disrespecting the country or disrespecting members of the military. and in fact, earlier in this hour, morgan radford interviewed a man who said just this. this is not about that at all. this is about people who don t have a voice and the nfl standing up for those people. i think that is a really important distinction and it is not intellectually honest for people like mark short to just say, oh, wait a minute, they shouldn t be disrespecting the country or the national anthem. in fact, they re being very patriotic. they clearly care about the country and they re taking this moment when everybody is paying attention to them for the national anthem saying we would rather we are proud of the country and we want this to be better. this is patriotic, what they re doing. not unpat